1. ISSN: 2278 – 1323
International Journal of Advanced Research in Computer Engineering & Technology
Volume 1, Issue 4, June 2012
Simulation and Analysis of Dropped Packets for
DSR Protocol in VANETs
Avleen Kaur Malhi, A. K. Verma
 communications. While the major objective has clearly been
Abstract— VANET (Vehicular Adhoc Network) is a new to improve the overall safety of vehicular traffic, promising
concept in the field of wireless networks. The main objective of traffic management solutions.
VANET is to build a powerful network between mobile vehicles
so that the vehicles can talk to each other for the safety of the
humans. The various protocols are being used in VANET
environment. The aim of work is to simulate and analyze the
DSR (Dynamic Source Routing) protocol in VANET. DSR
protocol is simulated under realistic scenario with the help of
mobility models. The work has been carried out with the help of
open-source simulation tools on realistic scenario of traffic with
the help of MOVE, SUMO and NS-2. The performance of DSR
protocol is tested for the number of dropped packets during the
simulation and results are also compared by varying the
number of nodes used for simulation. The analysis indicate that
there is increase in the number of dropped packets used as and
the average throughput of dropped packets also increases the
number of nodes are increased.
Index Terms— VANET, DSR, NS-2, SUMO, MOVE
Figure 1. VANET Example
I. INTRODUCTION
VANETs are characterized by[2]:
In the recent years, vehicular networking has gained a lot of  high velocity of the vehicles
popularity among the industry and academic research
 environment factors: obstacles, traffic jams, etc.
community and is seen to be the most valuable concept for
 determined mobility patterns that depend on source to
improving efficiency and safety for future transportations. A
destination path and on traffic conditions
Vehicular Ad-Hoc network is a form of Mobile ad-hoc
 intermittent communications (isolated networks of cars
Networks, to provide communication among nearby vehicles
due to the fragmentation of the network)
and between vehicles and nearby fixed equipment i.e.
roadside equipment. The main goal of VANET is providing  high congestion channels (e.g. due to high density of
safety and comfort for passengers. nodes).
The important factors that would influence the adoption of In this paper, we have analyzed the performance of Adhoc
VANET architecture for future vehicular applications would Routing Protocol, DSR protocol by taking the different
be - parameters such as cumulative sum of dropped packets,
 Low latency requirements for safety applications throughput and packet size.
 Extensive growth of interactive and multimedia
applications
 Increasing concerns about privacy and security II. APPLICATIONS IN VANETS
Transportation-related applications[3] are those applications
A view of such a network is shown in Figure 1. It is estimated
that increase the safety of the driver and passengers.
that the first systems that will integrate this technology are
Transportation-related applications range from safety
police and fire vehicles to communicate with each other for
applications such as cooperative forward collision warning or
safety purposes. Further, A novel type of wireless access
extended electronic brake lights to traffic management
called Wireless Access for Vehicular Environment (WAVE)
applications such as road-condition warnings or alternative
is dedicated to vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-roadside
route warnings. Convenience and personalized applications
Manuscript received june 20, 2012. increase the comfort of the driver and passengers.
Avleen Kaur Malhi, Computer Scince and Engineering Department,
Transportation-related applications and Convenience and
Thapar University, Patiala, India, Mobile No. 9530505253,(e-mail:
avleen.malhi@gmail.com) personalized applications have a set of requirements that is
A. K. Verma, Computer Scince and Engineering Department, Thapar common to almost all applications. The most interesting
University, Patiala, India, Mobile No. 9888601667, (e-mail: requirements are: coverage should be in the range of 10 to
akverma@thapar.edu)
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International Journal of Advanced Research in Computer Engineering & Technology
Volume 1, Issue 4, June 2012
1000 meters with a car maximum relative speed of 500 Km/h. The proactive routing means that the routing information like
Latency ranges between 50 ms to 500 ms. next forwarding hope is maintained in the background
In general, safety applications should not wait more than 200 irrespective of communication requests. Reactive Routing
ms. A likely situation may arise in case there are traffic jams Protocols implement route determination on a demand or
and redundant packets of multiple nodes consume the need basis and maintain only the routes that are currently in
bandwidth. use, thereby reducing the burden on the network when only a
subset of available routes is in use at any time . Position based
routing Protocols share the property of using geographic
A. Safety Related Applications
positioning information in order to select the next forwarding
Typical safety applications are characterized as being hops.
applications in which the main objective is to disseminate In our simulation, we have used the Reactive Routing
certain event that have occurred in the vicinity of the sender. Protocols, namely DSR.
Some examples described are:
A. DSR
 Cooperative awareness: to extend non-cooperative driver Dynamic source routing (DSR) [6] protocol is one of the
assistance systems whose perception is limited to the example of an on-demand routing protocol that is based on
operative range of on-board sensors (adverse weather, the concept of source routing. The DSR network is totally
obstacles or dangerous road conditions). self organizing and self configuring. DSR uses no periodic
 Cooperative assistance: distribution of data (e.g. warning routing messages like AODV, thereby reduces network
of accidents). bandwidth overhead, conserves battery power and avoids
large routing updates.
B. Convenience and Personalized Applications The DSR routing protocol discovers routes and maintains
Typical Convenience and personalized applications[4] are: information regarding the routes from one node to other by
 Car to Mobile devices: Those applications between the car using two main mechanisms: route discovery and route
and mobile devices (e.g. mobile phone, MP3, laptop, etc). maintenance. The DSR regularly updates its route cache for
 Car to Home and Car to Office: Communications between the sake of new available easy routes. Route Discovery is the
the car and private networks either at home or at office. mechanism by which a node S wishing to send a packet to a
 Car to Enterprise: Communications between the car and destination node D obtains a source route to D. Route
companies (e.g. restaurants, gas stations, parking areas, Discovery is used only when S attempts to send a packet to D
etc) that give road services. and does not already know a route to D. Route Maintenance
 Car to infrastructure: Information received by a car from is the mechanism by which node S is able to detect, with the
hot spots giving road and traffic information and car help of a source route to D, if the network topology has
access to Internet. changed such that it can no longer use its route to D because a
 Car to Car: Exchange of information between car users link along the route no longer works. If a link failure is found
(e.g. files, platoon traveling, etc). between source and destination, the source node tries to find
another route to the destination or invokes Route Discovery
DSR has a unique advantage of source routing.
As the route is part of the packet itself, routing loops, either
III. ROUTING PROTOCOLS short – lived or long – lived, cannot be formed as they can be
immediately detected and eliminated. The packet in DSR
In VANET, the routing protocols are classified into two carries all information pertaining to route in its preamble
categories: Topology based and Position based Routing (header) thus permitting the intermediate nodes to cache the
Protocols. Topology based routing protocols use links routing information in their route tables for their future use.
information that exist in the network to perform packet
forwarding. They are further divided into Proactive and IV. RESEARCH METHODOLOGY USED
Reactive.
To carry out the experiments in this paper, MOVE along with
SUMO and NS2 is used.
A. MOVE
A tool MOVE (MObility model generator for Vehicular
networks) [7] to facilitate users to rapidly generate realistic
mobility models for VANET simulations. MOVE is currently
implemented in java and is built on top of an open source
micro-traffic simulator SUMO. By providing a set of
Graphical User Interfaces that automate the simulation script
generation, MOVE allows the user to quickly generate
realistic simulation scenarios without the hassle of writing
simulation scripts as well as learning about the internal
details of the simulator. The output of MOVE is a mobility
Figure 2. Classification of routing protocols[5]
trace file that contains information about realistic vehicle
movements which can be immediately used by popular
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International Journal of Advanced Research in Computer Engineering & Technology
Volume 1, Issue 4, June 2012
simulation tools such as ns-2. The architecture of MOVE is It consists of two simulation tools. The network simulator
shown in Figure 3. (ns) contains all commonly used IP protocols. The network
The two main function of MOVE are: animator (NAM) is use to visualize the simulations.
 MAP Editor It is packaged with a bundle of rich libraries for simulating
 Vehicle Movement Editor wireless networks. All the mobile nodes in NS-2 quickly
The Map Editor is used to create the road topology. Currently assume that they are the part of Ad-hoc network and the
our implementation provides three different ways to create simulation mobile nodes connected with infrastructure
the road map – the map can be manually created by the user, networks are not really possible.
generated automatically, or imported from existing real
world maps such as publicly available TIGER. We have also V. SIMULATION
integrated Google Earth into MOVE to facilitate the creation The simulation parameters used and the simulation setup
of nodes in a realistic setting. The Vehicle Movement Editor for this study are described in this section.
allows the user to specify the trips of vehicles and the route
that each vehicle will take for one particular trip.
A. Simulation Setup
Simulation environment consists of 4,10 and 15 wireless
vehicle nodes which are moving on the lanes of mobility
model used and forming a Vehicular Ad-hoc Network,
moving about over a 652meters X 752 meters area for 1000
seconds of simulated time.
The table below list the details of the simulation setup used in
this simulation based analysis of DSR protocol.
Table 1: Simulation Setup
Figure 3. MOVE architecture
B. SUMO NS version NS-2.33
“Simulation of Urban MObility" (SUMO) [8] is an open
MOVE version 2.64
source, highly portable, microscopic road traffic simulation
package designed to handle large road networks. It allows the SUMO version 0.12.3
user to build a customized road topology, in addition to the
import of different readymade map formats of many cities Tracegraph version 2.0.2
and towns of the world. Figure 4. shows SUMO
visualization. DSR NS-2 Default
No. Of nodes 4,10,15
Traffic type TCP
Channel Type Wireless Channel
Network Interface Type Wireless physical
Antenna model Omnidirectional
Radio Propagation Model Two Ray Ground
Adhoc Routing Protocol DSR
Figure 4. SUMO Visualization
MAC type IEEE 802.11
C. NS-2
The Network Simulator (ns2) [9] is a discrete event Simulation Time 1000 seconds
driven simulator developed at UC Berkeley. We are using
Network Simulator NS2 for simulations of protocols. It Data Type CBR(Constant Bit Rate)
provides substantial support for simulation of TCP, routing
and multicast protocols over wired and wireless networks. Data packet size 1000 bytes
Ns-2 code is written either in C++ and OTCL and is kept in a
Window Size 20
separate file that is executed by OTCL interpreter, thus
generating an output file for NAM (Network animator) [10]. Scenario Urban
It then plots the nodes in a position defined by the code script
Road Traffic Direction
and exhibits the output of the nodes communicating with Multidirectional
each other.
Queue Length 50
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4. ISSN: 2278 – 1323
International Journal of Advanced Research in Computer Engineering & Technology
Volume 1, Issue 4, June 2012
B. Simulation Parameters
For this study three performance metrics are selected
namely:-
1) Throughput: Throughput describes as the total number of
received packets at the destination out of total transmitted
packets. It is the average rate of successful message delivery
over a communication channel. It is the number of received
packets per TIL (Time Interval Length). This data may be
delivered over a physical or logical link, or pass through a
certain network node. The throughput is usually measured
Figure 6. Cumulative sum of dropped packets vs event time
in bits per second (bit/s or bps), and sometimes in data
for 10 nodes
packets per second or data packets per time interval
length(TIL).
Total no. of received packets at destination * packet size
T = ----------------------------------------------------------
Total simulation time
2) Packets drop: The number of packets dropped at a given
instance of time in the simulation run determines the
efficiency of the protocol. The reason for packet drop may
arise due to congestion, faulty hardware and queue overflow
etc.
3) Simulation Time: It describes the total time taken by the Figure 7. Cumulative sum of dropped packets vs event time
simulator NS-2 to simulate the individual routing protocol. for 15 nodes
VI. RESULTS AND ANALYSIS INFERENCE: The number of dropped packets increases
with the increase in number of nodes. The packet loss is
The DSR protocol is being simulated over a realistic mobility always more at the initial stage and then increases slowly
model and the results are analyzed in different node densities with the event time. The event time interval also decreases as
of 4 nodes, 10 nodes and 15 nodes. the number of nodes increases due to the increase in dropped
packets.
A. Cumulative sum of dropped packets vs event time
B. Throughput of dropping packets
In this case, the number of dropped packets are analysed in
three cases of 4 nodes, 10 nodes, and 15 nodes.
Now, the throughput of dropped packets is analysed for 4, 10
and 15 nodes.
Figure 5. Cumulative sum of dropped packets vs event time
for 4 nodes
Figure 8. Throughput of dropping packets for 4 nodes
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5. ISSN: 2278 – 1323
International Journal of Advanced Research in Computer Engineering & Technology
Volume 1, Issue 4, June 2012
Figure 9. Throughput of dropping packets for 10 nodes Figure 12. Packet size vs Average throughput of dropping
packets for 10 nodes
Figure 10. Throughput of dropping packets for 15 nodes
Figure 13. Packet size vs Average throughput of dropping
INFERENCE: As the number of nodes increases, the packets for 15 nodes
steepness of graph increases as the throughput of dropping
packets increases with the number of nodes. INFERENCE: The highest ratio of dropped packets are of
lower sizes around 100 bytes. The maximum number of
C. Packet size vs Average throughput of dropping packets dropped packets are of size below 110 bytes.
The packet sizes are analysed for which there are more
number of packets dropped. VII. CONCLUSION
VANETs are an important research field which is emerging
nowdays. It defines the important technology required to
support Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS)
applications. Instead of developing the all new protocols for
VANET, an insight has been made to already existing
MANET protocols such as DSR.
DSR is a reactive routing protocol and has been extended on
VANET for simulations under MOVE and SUMO with
mobility models taken from MOVE. The experiment has
been conducted for 4 nodes, 10 nodes and 15 nodes to
understand the behavior of dropped packets. The analysis
against different parameters such as sum of dropped packets,
throughput and packet size has been done and following
Figure 11. Packet size vs Average throughput of dropping
observations has been made:
packets for 4 nodes
1) The number of dropped packets increases with increase
in number of nodes.
2) The throughput of dropping packets increases with the
increase in the number of nodes from 4 to 15, as the
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International Journal of Advanced Research in Computer Engineering & Technology
Volume 1, Issue 4, June 2012
number of dropped packets increases.
3) The more number of dropped packets are recorded for
the packet sizes between 80 to 100 bytes for all the three
scenarios of 4, 10 and 15 nodes.
The maximum nodes considered in the work are 15 due to
hardware constraints of the computer. So, it would be
interesting to see the behaviour of the DSR protocol for the
higher number of nodes, for which the machine of higher
configuration will be required.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
I would like to thank all the anonymous reviewers for their
constructive feedback on the work presented over here.
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[8] SUMO (2012). “Simulation of Urban Mobility”. Accessed on 11 May,
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[9] Ke Liu “Network Simulator 2: Introduction”, Dept. Of Computer
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Dr. A K Verma is currently a faculty in the department of Computer
Science and Engineering at Thapar University, Patiala. He received his B.S.,
M.S. and Doctorate in 1991, 2001 and 2008, respectively, majoring in
Computer science and engineering. He has worked as Lecturer at M.M.M.
Engg. College, Gorakhpur from 1991 to 1996. He joined Thapar University
in 1996 and is presently associated with the same Institute. He has been a
visiting faculty to many institutions. He has published over 100 papers in
referred journals and conferences (India and Abroad). He has chaired various
sessions in the International and National Conferences. He is a MIEEE,
MACM, MISCI, LMCSI, MIETE, GMAIMA. He is a certified software
quality auditor by MoCIT, Govt. of India. His research interests include
wireless networks, routing algorithms and cloud computing.
Avleen Kaur Malhi is currently pursuing her M.E. in Computer Science
and Engineering from Thapar University. She is doing her thesis work in the
area of Wireless Ad-Hoc Networks. She has completed her B.Tech from
Guru Nanak Dev Engineering College, Ludhiana in 2010. Her research
interests are VANETs and Wireless Ad-hoc Networks.
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